Software-defined networking (SDN) is an innovative network paradigm, offering substantial control of network operation through a network’s architecture. SDN is an ideal platform for implementing projects involving distributed applications, security solutions, and decentralized network administration in a multitenant data center environment due to its programmability. As its usage rapidly expands, network security threats are becoming more frequent, leading SDN security to be of significant concern. Machine-learning (ML) techniques for intrusion detection of DDoS attacks in SDN networks utilize standard datasets and fail to cover all classification aspects, resulting in under-coverage of attack diversity. This paper proposes a hybrid technique to recognize denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that combine deep learning and feedforward neural networks as autoencoders. Two datasets were analyzed for the training and testing model, first statically and then iteratively. The auto-encoding model is constructed by stacking the input layer and hidden layer of self-encoding models’ layer by layer, with each self-encoding model using a hidden layer. To evaluate our model, we use a three-part data split (train, test, and validate) rather than the common two-part split (train and test). The resulting proposed model achieved a higher accuracy for the static dataset, where for ISCX-IDS-2012 dataset, accuracy reached a high of 99.35% in training, 99.3% in validation and 99.99% in precision, recall, and F1-score. for the UNSW2018 dataset, the accuracy reached a high of 99.95% in training, 0.99.94% in validation, and 99.99% in precision, recall, and F1-score. In addition, the model achieved great results with a dynamic dataset (using an emulator), reaching a high of 97.68% in accuracy.

Software-Defined Networking (commonly referred to as SDN) is a newer paradigm that develops the concept of a software-driven network by separating data and control planes. It can handle the traditional network problems. However, this excellent architecture is subjected to various security threats. One of these issues is the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which is difficult to contain in this kind of software-based network. Several security solutions have been proposed recently to secure SDN against DDoS attacks. This paper aims to analyze and discuss machine learning-based systems for SDN security networks from DDoS attack. The results have indicated that the algorithms for machine learning can be used to detect DDoS attacks in SDN efficiently. From machine learning approaches, it can be explored that the best way to detect DDoS attack is based on utilizing deep learning procedures.Moreover, analyze the methods that combine it with other machine learning techniques. The most benefits that can be achieved from using the deep learning methods are the ability to do both feature extraction along with data classification; the ability to extract the specific information from partial data. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to recognize the low-rate attack, and it can get more computation resources than other machine learning where it can use graphics processing unit (GPU) rather than central processing unit (CPU) for carrying out the matrix operations, making the processes computationally effective and fast.